Don't let social media think for you • Hacker News Board

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#41

Post by cindarin » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 1:44 PM UTC

tristor wrote: post #30

cindarin wrote: post #14

I don't understand these posts. Why must the world at large censor themselves so an author can demand everyone see her work as perfection without hearing any other opinion? Why are the various, discordant voices considered "social media thinking for you", but the demand of absolute acquiescence is not?

I don't believe that's an accurate representation of the point the author of the article was trying to make. I believe that their point was that we should not pile on with mobs, believing that popularity or trends of the moment are correct (letting social media think for you) and instead perform our own analysis of available information or better yet avoid contentious situations altogether. Their point wasn't really…

There's no analysis here. There's no detail whatsoever; those are intentionally omitted, supposedly to protect the readers from being bored. Instead, the blogger offers only opinion with no support at best, and falsehoods presented as truth at worst.

I choose not to let them think for me. I will not disavow social media simply because some blogger expressed their own irrational, negative opinions of it.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#42

Post by SamBam » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 1:45 PM UTC

The mob is a huge problem with Twitter (and adjacent social media), and the issue with a mob is purely that of its size. It's the size that makes the mob, and everyone who has ever considered chiming in to add their voice why so-and-so was bad should stop to think about whether the world really needs that additional voice. Each individual voice may be perfectly right. So-and-so may really have done wrong. But did they really do such wrong that the 10,000th voice is needed?

I am ashamed to say I've done it myself, back when I was on Twitter. My feed would start lighting up with some really Bad thing that so-and-so said -- and generally it was "Bad" -- and I'd add my voice somewhere to that cacophony. Not necessarily writing to the Bad Person, but chiming in on someone's long thread.

Now I look back and see I was another participant in the mob.

Look, the author described in the post absolutely did herself no favors. Her book may have been great, but the way she interacted with people on social media was absolutely not. But being the 10,000th person to tell her that is never necessary. That's just wanting to join a mob, because mobs are fun, because you're all justified in this act together.

Mobs are scary, because everyone thinks they are justified. A good friend of mine grew up in Kenya and recounted that when he was about nine, he saw a mob catch a thief. Joining in with everyone else, he took a wire and whipped the man. Next thing he knew, the crowd had put tires over the alleged thief and set him on fire. He has never forgotten the guilt he felt.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#43

Post by throwkeep » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 1:47 PM UTC

Growling_owl wrote: post #16

It's not just social media. Media in general has a heavy bias on negative reporting , that's because humans are wired to have huge spikes in attention when there is a hint of bad news or character assassination. Back in the days it used to be monodirectional stream: from the Newspapers, Radios, TV towards the population. The internet and social media just amped up this phenomenon globally and the person which is the…

Yes, the news media is a slower and more centralized outrage machine. The upside of social media is that it's harder to manufacture consent (h/t Noam Chomsky) as it consists of millions of voices. Though that's threatened by the coordinated censorship of big tech, as we saw with the lab leak hypotheses and people being silenced on twitter, facebook and youtube for challenging the approved narrative on that. It finally broke though, but it took over a year! Although without social media, maybe that process would have taken decades?

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#44

Post by weezin » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 1:54 PM UTC

mkr-hn wrote: post #38

weezin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently deleted a lot of social media accounts. My concerns are any accounts I created for important things using social media accounts, and losing track of what behavior is publicly acceptable in the ever changing Overton window. I feel like the benefits to productivity and mental health will exceed those concerns greatly though.

>> "losing track of what behavior is publicly acceptable in the ever changing Overton window." A good skill to cultivate for this worry is listening without interrupting or judging when you get feedback. Often what someone who feels hurt wants, regardless of the merit of that hurt, is to feel heard. Listening is timeless. "I don't fully understand, but I hear you." Sometimes the best you can do is get someone to move…

Thank you for sharing, I think what I'm also worried about is lack of sharing, for example the black squares on instagram. I was called out for not posting one (I had 1 picture on IG from 3 years ago). Although I imagine that wouldn't have happened had I deleted IG prior. I just can see "I don't fully understand" when asked about something will become willful ignorance to people that deem the context unavoidable.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#45

Post by jerf » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 1:54 PM UTC

mkr-hn wrote: post #38

weezin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently deleted a lot of social media accounts. My concerns are any accounts I created for important things using social media accounts, and losing track of what behavior is publicly acceptable in the ever changing Overton window. I feel like the benefits to productivity and mental health will exceed those concerns greatly though.

>> "losing track of what behavior is publicly acceptable in the ever changing Overton window." A good skill to cultivate for this worry is listening without interrupting or judging when you get feedback. Often what someone who feels hurt wants, regardless of the merit of that hurt, is to feel heard. Listening is timeless. "I don't fully understand, but I hear you." Sometimes the best you can do is get someone to move…

Unfortunately, in terms of staying in the Overton window, that advice is useless. You give good advice at how not to annoy one particular person, but the entire problem is that when speaking in public, everyone gets a crack at accusing you. It doesn't even have to be based on truth; they can accuse based on misunderstandings. They can accuse based on deliberate misunderstandings, because they have other reasons to take you down, or just simply see a chance to be a hero at your expense. As weezin also shares in a sibling post, you can be attacked for not doing something. It doesn't matter how kind you are to one person, you can't do that for hundreds at a time, let alone to the millions that a wrong tweet can reach.

In modern parlance, your post amounts to victim blaming. You can't simultaneously engage with thousands of people in any manner that all of those thousands will find acceptable. That's always been true; the change is the belief in a large number of powerful subcultures that they have a right to be engaged with in manners they find acceptable, by people they've never heard of, in interactions they aren't really a part of except that they happened to be within broadcast range, in the worst cases that they possibly even actively sought out precisely because it would give them something to be angry about. (I'm not accusing everybody of doing that. I think it's rare, most people have better things to do with their time. But there only has to be a few to be a problem.) In the long term, this is an impossible standard.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#46

Post by seneca » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 1:57 PM UTC

weezin wrote: post #25

spadros wrote: post #3

Yes I quit social media a couple of years ago and agree with pretty much everything the author says. Social media environments encourage incendiary discussion because it fuels upvotes and general attention. Most people won't take the time to consider a more valid grey opinion because they've jumped to a conclusion and are busy attacking someone, or because it won't get as much attention. The first thing that came bac…

I recently deleted a lot of social media accounts. My concerns are any accounts I created for important things using social media accounts, and losing track of what behavior is publicly acceptable in the ever changing Overton window. I feel like the benefits to productivity and mental health will exceed those concerns greatly though.

> "losing track of what behavior is publicly acceptable in the ever changing Overton window"

The largest benefit of abandoning social media is probably the realization that the "very online" type don't actually dictate social mores, and can (and should) be largely ignored. That feeling that the Twitter mob can tell you what is acceptable is "[letting] social media think for you", and is exactly the problem.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#47

Post by mattgreenrocks » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 1:59 PM UTC

This gets to my biggest issue with social media: the primacy of the collective opinion.

As the article states, nuance has no place, nor does the idea that we should evaluate something based on its intrinsic qualities. Instead, the most important thing about everything is what We think about it in this instant. And that is highly mutable: We will change that whenever we wish, and you need to keep up.

The very notion that something can be evaluated based on intrinsic qualities (such as a person's character, a thing's aesthetics, the efficacy of a policy) is devalued because they do not serve the ultimate goal of a collective opinion. Science is a meme/religion we trot out to justify our already-formed beliefs.

The reason this is such a problem is that you cannot develop any sort of taste if you are constantly out-sourcing it to a constantly-shifting collective opinion. And taste is a requisite for skill.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#48

Post by wussboy » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 2:02 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #35

spadros wrote: post #3

Yes I quit social media a couple of years ago and agree with pretty much everything the author says. Social media environments encourage incendiary discussion because it fuels upvotes and general attention. Most people won't take the time to consider a more valid grey opinion because they've jumped to a conclusion and are busy attacking someone, or because it won't get as much attention. The first thing that came bac…

I found facebook became more valuable to me once I decided I would only post about things I want my friends to know. That is pictures of my kid's new bike, or a video of the baby babbling. Facebook does a very good job of ensuring my close friends and family keep up with the cute little things in life. I'm still working on getting out of all the groups that waste space. Sadly many useful things have moved to facebook…

Interesting. I had the opposite experience to this. Even though all I ever wanted to know about was what was happening to my friend's kids, my feed was taken over with political and social justice outrage. Outrage sells.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#49

Post by pjerem » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 2:03 PM UTC

throw737858 wrote: post #5

If you click on toxic content, algorithm is going to feed it to you. Twitter is perfectly fine if you unfollow and block toxic influencers. There is propably even keyword based filtering. For news you can watch international news stations from India. Very realistic and refreshing.

> Twitter is perfectly fine if you unfollow and block toxic influencers.

Not my experience tbh. I quit Twitter after having tried to follow only accounts that interested me.

But once Twitter starts to be unable to create a sufficiently dense "infinite feed", its algorithm starts to artificially fill your feed and shows you the likes and answers (and not only tweets & RTs) of the people you follow or the hottest tweets of people followed by people you follow.

I was totally unable to protect myself from the "Twitter's today shitstorm". So I quit.

Re: Don't let social media think for you

#50

Post by jiofih » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 2:03 PM UTC

bnralt wrote: post #36

tester34 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's poor deal, it's not worth. Just because I may learn some small things that probably does not affect me directly and additionally receive some news that make my mood worse due to hearing some yet another negative news about bad stuff / politics / yada yada, what's the point? 80% of the news I read is HN and some programming related websites and whenever I jump into "mainstream" media, then I feel like I'm reading…

Indeed. The other problem is that the news is often filled with misleading narratives that lead people to be less informed than before, and that it creates a huge opportunity cost in terms of attention. When you cut out the news you start to notice a lot of things around you that you were glossing over before.

How do you get informed on things happening on the other side of the world? (please don’t say Twitter!)